The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action must have ample resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's far better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.